hsshah

For a less biased still gentle introduction on epigenetics: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/epigenetics.html

Indeed. Check out: http://www.urbanpiper.com/fe/business/

Disclaimer: I am the cofounder of this company.

Thanks oliver. That is reassuring to know. I will take it for a spin.

I like the value proposition of being private by default.

With a kid on the way, I expect to share lot of pics and videos to close family members and I am in search of a proper (and private) solution to this.

However, before I commit to any service these days, I always verify what is the company's policy and offering for user's private data. Do they allow you to easily export/download your personal data?

Unfortunately, with Everyme, they have not mentioned anything about this on their site.

To your first point, some scientist believe it is hard wired in our DNA to associate with any form of group (as this played a role in evolution). Here's a related interesting talk on TED that I recently saw: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral...

SocialCam posted a comment on the blog: "Matt - please recheck this - we have pushed a fix to correct this problem. If you turn off Social Mode in the app it should remain off the next time you open the app."

I have to say I am a bit skeptical if this was truly a "fix" or a "rollback" of a feature.

Very creative indeed. I have been using Picoboard (http://www.picocricket.com/picoboard.html) for teaching with Scratch. This gives so many ideas for the resistance sensors. Awesome job guys. Will back you up.

Do you know how the non-cloud aka computer-to-computer syncing done? Particularly, is the data cached in some intermediate server? I love the idea and would use it if the answer to the above question is No!

Recently I saw a documentary ("Waiting for 'Superman'") about the state of education and schools in US and its biggest challenges. It was very disheartening. But it did try to discuss potential solutions. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants a better picture about what's going on.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/

It is available on Netflix streaming.

Indeed. I got fed up with this couple of months back. Depending on the topic, I would do a site search on my own list of sites. I did this so many times, I decided to create customized search engines on top of Google. It will save you a lot of time. Check it out: http://www.google.com/cse/

Worked great! There goes my time down the drain! Can we have nonprocrast for all submitted sites as well? ;-)

Please demo this to Evernote. They need to leverage this asap!

Anyone else thought of fractals when watching this? This is a great interface to manipulate fractal drawings. Great work.

That is indeed a good question. One of the key challenge in reforming education field is the feedback cycle is big. Very time consuming to track experiments. So I have add that what I stated was my hypothesis reinforced with a small dataset of my experience teaching 'Computing & Internet' to middle school kids.

I have to clarify that my comment was targeted towards current Udacity (other MOOC) participants who wants to learn programming as a value added skill or hobby.

If you want to graduate with CS major and/or want to pick CS as a profession; I do believe you need to have a good understanding on the entire stack. There are no shortcuts to being a good professional and achieving mastery in any field requires committed hard work.

IMHO, this is bad advice. It is like saying if you want to teach how to change oil in the car, teach the entire automotive engineering curriculum.

Introducing extreme complexity so early in the process turns off people; they give up easily and (falsely, in many cases) start believing that programming is not for them.

The first introduction should have enough fundamental programming concepts to enable the students to make something useful and tangible, by themselves. As the interests and the objectives grow, they can delve deeper into the domain.

I think with Khan Academy, Udacity and others, we are entering a new paradigm of "Just in time learning". Schools should focus on teaching smart learning techniques, critical thinking etc instead of cramming more and more topics in their curriculums.

Nice way to inspire new hires. Like it.

However, I worry about Apple lawyers tracking down the person who uploaded this and offer a cease and desist instead of new hire orientation!

Indeed. Pair this with Google's Project Glass and you can avoid the awkward (in public) voice commands.

While reading the post, I was not sure if the tone was sarcastic or genuine! On a second read, it does feel like a genuine comment. Some folks should use 'Not Sarcasm' tag!

That's what I feared. Unless you are willing to commit time/effort to really learn the language, I fear the usefulness of this is limited to impressing friends and staff at Korean restaurants.

This is indeed surprisingly easy. Now, where's the cheat sheet for 'understanding' what we read (other than proper nouns)?!

You would make Bret Victor proud! For a slight chance you have not seen this; check it out for additional inspiration http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://worrydream.com/

This nicely correlated to their Project Glass demo where the guy asks for directions 'inside' the book store. To turn that into a reality, Google will certainly have to crowdsource this info.

Nope. Still Bing has a more detailed layout.

This is a ranking of SEOs of CS schools rather than overall quality of the institutions that 'US News' ranking is trying to capture.

Nice work. Interesting way to visualize.

One request, in the UI, where you have checkboxes, can you add 'exclusive' select. So for example, I want to see ONLY 'acquisitions' made; right now, we have to deselect everything else manually.

If only I had more upvotes to give.

Don't teach programming/technology just for the sake of it to non-CS folks. If they enjoyed that, they would have opted for CS major.

However, strongly believe that there is a need for better understanding of the computational world, outside of CS domain. Help build familiarity (kind of computational intuition) and they will participate eagerly in technological revolution in their domain. (instead of pushing back)

Ideally we should introduce computational skills in middle schools. Scratch is a great platform to teach these skills implicitly; kids focus more time on being creative/fun and less with writing code.

For adults, we need to identify strong application areas and start from there. Loved to hear what Professor LeBlanc is doing in his course 'Computing for Poets'. We should have more of these 'Computing for X' style introductions. (X = [Doctors, Teachers, Product Managers, ....])

If anyone is interested in working on this, PM me. Love to discuss ideas.

Purely for graphing, I like Desmos. Works great on iPad as well. https://www.desmos.com/calculator

They already started integrating other sources. Just today I got couple of listings from lemonfree.

This reminds me of their Vista PR stunt where they tricked unsuspecting users to give favorable feedback about Vista on camera.

Indeed. Couple of optimistic talks at TED that shows that on an 'average' it IS getting better. http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen... http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_o...

However, the 24/7 news cycle drums up everything that is negative and hence most of "feel" that it is getting worse.